Scott McLemee

Scott McLemee is the Intellectual Affairs columnist for Inside Higher Ed. In 2008, he began a three-year term on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. From 1995 until 2001, he was contributing editor for Lingua Franca. Between 2001 and 2005, he covered scholarship in the humanities as senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2005, he helped start the online news journal Inside Higher Ed, where he serves as Essayist at Large, writing a weekly column called Intellectual Affairs. His reviews, essays, and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Nation, Newsday, Bookforum, The Common Review, and numerous other publications. In 2004, he received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. He has given papers or been an invited speaker at meetings of the American Political Science Association, the Cultural Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, and the Organization of American Historians.

In We Demand: The University and Student Protests, Roderick A. Ferguson's understanding of the campus activism of the 1960s and ’70s rests on a clear sense of the university as a crucial part of the social machine, writes Scott McLemee.

Scott McLemee examines recent scholarly discussions of mass shootings and the role that news reports play in amplifying our awareness of each increasingly horrific, yet a little less surprising, event.

Nathan Kravis’s On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch From Plato to Freud examines why that piece of furniture ever entered the analytic tradition and how its efficacy and centrality have now come under scrutiny, writes Scott McLemee.

Debora Diniz’s historical and ethnographic study Zika: From the Brazilian Backlands to Global Threat illuminates the emergence of the disease and how global health organizations have dealt -- and not dealt -- with it, writes Scott McLemee.